


Somewhere, Waters Rest

by fansofcollisions



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Steve Rogers, Christianity, Developing Relationship, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Religion, Religious Guilt, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 07:39:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13806591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fansofcollisions/pseuds/fansofcollisions
Summary: Tony asks about your relationship with Bucky, and Clint’s got your fist behind your back before you consciously notice you’ve tightened it.Steve wrestles with fitting his religious upbringing into a modern setting, where none of the same unspoken norms apply. Of all his teammates, Tony has the hardest time being supportive.





	Somewhere, Waters Rest

**Author's Note:**

> (Let's all disregard the fact that it's much more likely an Irish boy in 1920-1940s NYC would have been Catholic than Protestant, owing to the fact that I know very little about Catholicism and more than a little about Protestantism, and this fic is not-insignificantly a vehicle for me to project a few of my own insecurities surrounding the religious environment in which I was raised.)

It goes like this – you stand, sit, stand again. There’s a song, an interlude, the doxology, requests for the sick and the poor. A man raises his wizened hands above a block of wood and proclaims forgiveness or damnation, whichever is the flavour of the week, and you do not drink the wine but bow your head for a familiar blessing, too young to partake but too old to spend the service below the creaking boards of the sanctuary floor, sequestered away from the forgiveness and damnation alike. You don’t miss the must of the nursery, or the coughing that followed you out like a spectre from the deep.

This is a routine you hold yourself to, and it’s as natural as getting out of bed in the morning. Even in wartime, under threat of fire and brimstone and the red blood of a crooked cross, you stand and you sit and you sing and you finally drink the wine with a constitution capable of carrying more than a swallow, and a man in a uniform stands at a makeshift pulpit and proclaims the holy word – always damnation, nowadays. And on Sundays when the damnation rains down around your head in pieces of fiery shrapnel and the howl of the bombs, you mutter your prayers to yourself, and sing what you remember, which seems less every day. You hold on.

You wake up one Sunday and the church is gone. The creaking floorboards are covered in foosball tables and couches and rank with the smell of cigarette smoke, and a girl with a ponytail and a cut above her eye hands you a volunteer application. You take it and leave, and it ends up slipped into the folded bulletin of the newer church down the street. There’s carpet on the floor and nobody holds a hymnal – eyes all fixed on the words projected on a blank white wall – but the routine is the same. Sit, stand, sing. Forgiveness, this time.

It’s your first outing since you were dragged from the ice, and it’s the only thing that’s normal in your life.

\---

Tony asks about your relationship with Bucky, and Clint’s got your fist behind your back before you consciously notice you’ve tightened it. It’s an instinctual thing, a threat response. Tony’s got his hackles up now too. He snarls that he was asking seriously, _god_ , Steve, and you spit back that he shouldn’t even insinuate anything like that, what is _wrong_ with you, and it takes you a full ten seconds to realize that the countless eyes of reproach around the room are not fixed on Tony. You take a deep breath and Clint drops your hand.

It’s been three weeks since New York and five since you were woken from the ice. They talk to you like it was five weeks since you were wrapped in swaddling clothes. They ask you why it’s wrong. You don’t have the words to justify your position because you’ve never had to explain this before. Everybody knew.

Doesn’t everybody know?

“-not up to getting into a theological debate tonight-” says Clint, and there’s the scriptural argument out the window. Tony is still glaring, though more at the ceiling than you. You’re not sure why he’s the most upset in the room. If anything, he’s proved with redundancy that his preferences are nothing but natural – if not discreet.

You’ve got no other explanation, and no one is on your side. You almost wish Thor were here to share the burden of being the stranger in a strange land. In the end, you leave the room with clenched teeth and shaking fists, promising to think on it. Bruce left long before you. Tony’s eyes still haven’t moved from the ceiling.

There was never anything more than friendship between you and Bucky. This is the first time you’ve answered that question without ending the conversation wheezing and bloodied in a dirty alleyway. This is the first time you’ve answered with the capacity to fight back, and this is the first time you’re not sure you were right to do so.

\---

You’re a goody-two-shoes, according to Tony. He tells you this every Sunday that you step into the communal kitchen, fine pressed and hair sleek. The offer is extended, as always, and as always Tony presses a thermos of coffee into your hand and shoves you out the door. He used to say ‘not on your life’ and now he says ‘maybe, not today’, which is not necessarily progress so much as resignation on his part. You can’t help yourself; you have to ask.

Sam comes with you sometimes. He’s non-practicing but he was raised like you, or enough like you, to feel comfortable in the space of a church. (You understand, in theory, why Tony doesn’t.) It’s nice to have the company, nice to find that common ground. It’s hard not to miss singing the same songs as your friends. There are no more gramophones and lindy hop halls, but there is always “How Great Thou Art” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”.

(“Onward, Christian Soldiers” seems to have fallen out of popularity, but you suppose it’s less appropriate now than it once was.)

Natasha comes once, but disappears into the woodwork before the cookies can be laid and coffee poured in the fellowship hall. You hadn’t expected her to accept the invitation. You suspect that she hadn’t either.

The thing is, going to church doesn’t make people good. It reminds them that they should strive to be.

You ask Natasha again. She smiles vaguely and says, ‘maybe’.

In this case, you think it’s progress.

\---

There are little things you get used to, constants that aren’t quite so constant anymore, small adjustments to your expectations. You don’t flinch at your colleagues taking the Lord’s name in vain, you don’t blink at being asked out to dinner on a Sunday evening, you omit the ‘God’ from ‘bless you’. You don’t know how much of this is compromise and how much is falling into the new status quo. In the end, it amounts to the same thing.

It’s not that you’re perfect, or ever were. You swore when elders were out of earshot, when impressionable young souls couldn’t overhear, and you got the same small thrill from the forbidden words passing your lips as any young man would. You might not have taken a girl to bed before making an honest woman of her, but you’d entertained the thought in the darkest of night, in the dullest hours of the walk home from school.

Tony beams, all parentally pleased, the first time he hears the word ‘fuck’ exit your lips. He didn’t think you had it in you. There’s a Lilliputian war in your head between the you that feels patronized by his surprise and the you that’s as proud as your mother would be for turning out so well, with whatever definition of well fit the bill in 1943. There’s arrogance in the thought, and you push that down to lie in the well of all the other unchristian feelings. The you that’s annoyed wins.  Your frown only forces Tony’s smile wider, wilder.

 You say it again under your breath that night, and again, just to taste the forbidden fruit on your tongue.

It’s easier next time. It draws the same smile. You return the expression in kind.

\--

‘Superhero’ is not a government ordained position. There is no sick leave, no mandatory minimum salary, no statutory holidays, no guarantee of a steady retirement pension - if you make it long enough to retire. You take days off when you get them, ride the wake of the calm before the next week’s storm and drift off for as many hours as your body allows. You do what you need to.

Sundays are not a sacred day. Villains don’t wait for the prayer shawls to be shirked to rain their fire on cities. You catch bombs before they can smash the steeples you’d rather be standing beneath. You forget to mutter your prayers, too busy shouting orders through the comm system to the people in your charge. You forget to feel guilty for forgetting. It’s good to be needed. It’s good to be a saviour. It fills up a space within you that war vacated, carved from the bones of the enemies you almost forgot were people until their skulls crunched under the weight of too solid a fist.

You go to church when you can, and you accept when you can’t. After all, you can put aside the religion when needs be. You can never stop being a soldier.

\---

There’s a gap as wide as Russia between granting moral absolution to another human being and granting the same to yourself.

You’ve come a long way from throwing punches at the mere suggestion of improper conduct between two men. If a reporter chases you down (it’s happened) and shoves a microphone in your face and asks how you feel about gay marriage (more than once) you can respectfully and honestly say that you wish only happiness for every loving couple in this great country. Some reporters walk away looking gladder about this response than others, but somehow you’re sure those with sour expressions aren’t coming at the issue from a holy place.

Reporters also like to ask about you and Natasha. You and Natasha, you and Natasha, you and Natasha. You chuckle and neither confirm nor deny, and it’s something you can laugh about together in the evenings.

One day, they ask about you and Tony, and you don’t feel like you’ve come quite as far as you’d thought. Clint isn’t standing behind you, and you have enough self-control not to throw yourself at a 120-pound reporter in a pencil skirt, but your teeth are on edge all the same. You offer a simple denial and intimate that the media likes to stir things up with a pleasant smile, and she laughs, and the situation is diffused, and the camera can’t see your palms sweating through the fabric of your uniform. You don’t look at Tony for two days after for fear of your face turning red.

It’s not a bad thing, to look at a man that way. It’s just not you. You aren’t… that way.

It’s not a bad thing.

You know that.

\---

_There are no atheists in foxholes._

That’s the type of sanctimonious falsehood Bucky would’ve written on a scrap of paper with a dirty fingernail, before stomping it into the ground and pissing on the same spot. There were atheists alright, and Bucky was proud to be one of them. Well, as proud as one could be while still going to church every Sunday and dutifully paying one’s tithe from the pittance of a military salary. There are appearances to uphold.

People say it over coffee after church, discussing weekly events, congratulating each other on the strength of their faith, crowing at their own cleverness, and you think, _you weren’t there._

How could you know what you cried out watching his body fall into the icy abyss? What you promised? What good it did?

Bucky didn’t believe in a God. He was thoroughly modern in that way, and in others you’d die to show him, if he were here to see it. But he still held your hand in those foxholes. He whispered with you as you bent down in prayer, as you pleaded not for your own life but the men that you’d charged with, the boys-not-quite-men you had to bring home to sweethearts and fathers and mangy dogs. He believed in you, and that was enough for him.

You don’t want to think about the lot that Bucky’s devotion has gotten him. But when it comes down to it, even after decades of torture and pain, he still follows you when it matters. How’s that for faith? Maybe you should feel ashamed at how much stronger his conviction is than your own.

But really, you just feel tired of searching.

\---

It takes nearly two years for you to define the strange tension in the air when you and Tony are together.

In your eyes, he is primarily composed of two elements. Firstly, a man like you – determined, passionate, stubborn. Secondly, Howard’s son. The importance of the second, at first so vital to provide context and comparison, now wanes day by day as you understand more of Tony and less of Stark. The truth of the first grows steadily in your heart, until you forget that his close-held smile reminds you of a long-lost friend.

In his eyes, you are primarily composed of two elements. Firstly, a mythic figure – sturdy, infallible, radiant. Secondarily, his father’s friend. The first and second shift in priority, but neither perception seems to fade or mutate.  You are static in his eyes, the Odysseus of legend, hated and loved by proximity to another man both hated and loved. Your potential for humanity died with his father, trapped in the limbo of insecurity and bitterness that haunts the Stark name.

Howard Stark, the man, both God and devil, and you the living embodiment of his ghost. Tony Stark, the man and nothing else, always looking in. And the two of you, never quite seeing eye to eye.

You can pinpoint the exact moment when the fact of your inhumanity cracks behind Tony’s eyes, when the mountains begin to shift and crumble. Sparks sputter around the shield that carves a half moon into his chest, and you collapse onto the ground beside him. He’s got a shellshocked look, corpse-like, that certain depth of expression of being miraculously handed life when you were expecting the killing blow. You’ve delivered enough near-fatal hits to know it. He’s not wrong to wear it. In the fever of _Bucky, protect Bucky_ you forgot he was a person. You are a soldier, before anything else.

He always thought there was something essentially pure about you. Something human enough to scream at, but too sacred to touch. That all ends today, dead and buried in the depths of Siberian winter.

This is the last time you see Tony in a long while. It’s not until hell descends on earth in a haze of purple smoke that you find each other again, and by that point you’re not even sure _you_ recognize the man reflected in his eyes.

\---

The dust settles on a world that’s not quite new, and a little less hopeful than before. Every war is the one to end them all, until the next comes along. The you that still labours in an asthmatic stupor of optimism wants to believe that now you have time to rest, to reflect. The you that hasn’t finished signing off the death certificates of the last day’s battle knows that the war never truly ends. It simmers below the sewer lines, snaking black tendrils of violence between the pillars that hold up society as you know it.

You’ve lived through two wars. You survived the first but by the grace of God. You survived the second by the hand of friends and hard-won allies.

You’re not convinced you’ll survive a third.

\---

The reporters love you more than ever. Thrice-famous war hero, and a redemption story to boot. See how the criminal Captain returned from exile saved the day in the nick of time!

You’ve always been the one to lecture the team on the importance of public appearances, but even you have lost your luster, tired of the same tired questions and the same tired answers. Without the mask and the wooden shield and the cotton uniform, it’s not as easy as it once was to stand tall on that grandstand and give the crowd what they want.

You never thought you’d feel relieved at a reporter quipping about your renewed closeness to Tony Stark, but it’s not a question about death, or war, or fallen government, and that startles you enough to draw a gust of laughter from your lips. The old embarrassment is long cauterized – you’ve witnessed too many horrors, lived too many lives to continue to see love of any sort as a wicked thing.

“Well,” you hear yourself say. “Don’t think he hasn’t popped the question, but I’m an old-fashioned man. I need to be wooed.” For the rest of the day, you feel like yourself again, the version of yourself who used to crack raucous jokes with Bucky in the brightly lit corners of dance halls. Girls like that about you, or so Bucky had said. They admire a man with a sense of humour.

It doesn’t even click, that Tony is avoiding you, until Bruce jabs you in the ribs and tells you to go fix whatever you broke so that his lab partner will stop sulking in the corner.

You find him laid across a table, arms deep into the chest of the robot suspended above him: Michelangelo at work. It’s good timing – Tony can’t keep playing the evasion game without forfeiting the night’s delicate work, and so you lean against the table, facing the far wall, and wait for Tony to talk.

 The words come between muttered curses and electrical sparks, deft fingers breathing life into the machine with a sort of methodical grace even as Tony rambles more erratically to and from the point at hand. Through all the noise, you manage to pick out one common theme.

_Stupid thing to say, Steve-_

_They won’t leave you alone now-_

_They’re going to think-_

And your first reaction is anger, because you don’t _care_ what they think of you, you don’t car- oh.

Oh.

You never asked _him_ , did you? Never even considered it.

The guilt you feel is, for once, justified.

With the ghost of bloody fists and alleyways on your mind, you pose the question. You don’t expect an answer, but you get one – more whisper than word, wrung from hesitant lips.

_Yes._

And maybe… that’s what you needed to hear. That it wasn’t just you. That you aren’t the only one.

Something heavy and leaden clenched around your heart begins to crumble, and for the first time in your life, you let your mind travel where you shouldn’t – where you _haven’t_ – let it go.

At some point, Tony lets one shaking hand fall to the table. You put your hand over his, and feel how the tremors match your own. You’re both too old to feel this afraid.

You resolve not to let go until the shaking stops, and so you stay like that the whole night, with your eyes fixed on the place your hands meet, and Tony still staring at the ceiling, breathing in and out.

\---

After so many years of selectively omitting thoughts that don’t fit the narrative you’ve established for your life, it all comes together rather quickly.

It’s hard at first, but it doesn’t stay that way very long. In between bouts of panicked self-doubt and recrimination, you have more late-night conversations, and more comforting touches, and more _yes_ ’s. And it gets easier, until you wake up one morning and realize you forgot to hate that part of yourself today.

You go to church for the first time in weeks, anxious that you’ll find yourself back where you started, but it feels like it always did, and the shame doesn’t return. As long as you don’t ask, you don’t need to know what the other congregation members would think of you, if they knew.

You still have your peace, your community. The only difference is, you can have _him_ as well.

This is all so much simpler than you were led to believe.

\---

It’s three months into what might be called a _relationship_ , and you’re almost comfortable, and then he asks how you can stand it. How you can stand to be in a place where people hate people like you? You know his double-speak well enough now to hear the additional _like me_ hidden beneath his admonishment.

_How can you do it? How can you live that lie? How-_

You end the conversation swiftly, without an answer, and for once in his life Tony doesn’t press, but once the initial panic is gone you find that you want him to. On long walks, in crowded subway stations, you practice. You voice a thousand conversations in your head, your tone more sure, words more poised than a soldier’s lips can speak.

“I know what you want, Tony. You want me to say what harm the church has done to me. But it’s not as simple as that. Is it for you, to say goodbye to what you’ve known? You cried for your parents when they died, even though they harmed you. I spend every Sunday morning reconciling the things I knew with what I know, what I’ve become, what I was, what I am today. I don’t know what to call myself anymore. But I know that I have to judge the good with the harm. I can’t erase what I gained along with what I lost. I can’t cut out a living, breathing, vital part of my history and leave it behind. It’s too much to ask.”

Tony won’t understand. You know you can’t expect him to. You can’t take him back into that space. Can’t douse his childhood in hymns, colour his weekends with stained-glass sunlight, feed him peach cobbler off chipped plates. You can’t place countless hands on his shoulders and pray for a mother’s wellness. You wouldn’t want to. There’s nothing but pain for him down that road.

He doesn’t ask again. It’s something you should bring up, but you don’t. You have conversations in your head, and there are no more thermoses offered on Sunday mornings. You aren’t allowed to feel stung by this.

\--

Sometimes, you dream about flying away.

If tomorrow, someone turned up on your doorstep with a magic machine that could take you back to that day in the airplane, would you accept?

It’s an intrusive thought, but you can’t seem to shake it from your mind.

_In another lifetime, a Steve Rogers saves Bucky from plummeting to certain death, and narrowly avoids a crash that might have killed them all. This Steve Rogers survives the war and comes home with a chest weighed down by the lines of medals stitched neatly to his breast. He finds an apartment waiting for him, and Peggy on the doorstep, her form as inviting as any comfort he once associated with home._

_They go to the same little church down the street, this Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter, and send their children down beneath the floorboards to learn their lessons while the two sit with hands clasped, in rapt attention. Stand, sit, stand again. The doxology plays, and Peggy’s voice is clear as a sunny sky, and this Steve never needs to wonder if he’s capable of loving differently. He’ll never love another person more than he loves her._

You would have been happy, in this fantasy of yours. Happier than you’ll ever be in this life. You can’t deny it, and some days you ache with the knowledge of it.

One more thing to feel guilty for.

\---

You believe in many things. You believe in freedom, and human goodness, and a higher power that you once called God. But you do not believe in fairytales.

You are what you are, not who you could have been. You have a makeshift family of sorts, and Tony, and time to grow, when you watched so many others cut down before they got the chance to live. You know your purpose, and that is to sustain the long breath between wars, and to stop today’s children from becoming soldiers like you.

And so, in the end, you cannot call yourself anything other than blessed.

 

 


End file.
